


Unknown Roads Lead Away From Home

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Good Hunting [23]
Category: Gundam Wing, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural
Genre: Dark, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 09:31:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12528300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Rodney and the team's progress toward opening the gates of Atlantis is sidetracked by a child asking for food.





	Unknown Roads Lead Away From Home

Rodney smelled the child before he heard it. 

He listed his head, wrinkling his nose offended, at the scent, prepared to have words with whichever Winchester was the culprit, and then a small, disheveled creature said,

“Hey mister, do you have any food?”

Rodney yelped and nearly toppled off of the picnic bench, only just managed to stop his laptop from falling off the table. 

Standing beside his picnic table was a human child of indeterminable gender or age, skinny, pale-skinned beneath the dirt smudges on its nose and mouth, mousy hair matted and unkempt, wearing dirty denim shorts and a t-shirt of unknown color. It peered up at him with watery blue-gray eyes.

“What?” Rodney asked.

“Do you have any food?” The child held unnaturally still as it peered at him.

Rodney closed his laptop, lest the creature prove literate and glimpse classified information. Or notice that he was leveling up his Knight Hunters paladin on the sly. Vala was pretty insistent about their guild fighting through dungeons together.

“Where are your parents?” Rodney asked. “Get food from there.”

“Mama’s asleep,” the child said.

“What about your father?”

The child shrugged.

Rodney scanned his surroundings. The bus was parked in a pretty nice RV park, mostly for holidaymakers. Rather than stay in base housing at the Mountain, where certain members of the team would have to pretend to be perfectly heterosexual, the team had agreed to just camp on the bus near the mountain.

It was better for everyone if Rodney and Carter weren’t in an enclosed space for too long, both teams agreed.

So RV park it was.

It was a very nice RV park, with a clubhouse and showers and a pool and hot tub, plus the one little rec room had a piano in it. Where had the child come from?

Then Rodney remembered. The trailer park across the street. He craned his neck. The child had walked that far?

“Well, go wake your mother up,” Rodney said.

The child continued to peer at him unblinkingly. “She doesn’t wake up after she burns her foil.”

That made zero sense.

“I’m hungry,” the child said, a note of whining entering its voice.

Finally, Rodney gave in and hollered for John. It was a sad day when Rodney was the insensitive one in a relationship between a scientist and a recalcitrant, sarcastic, emotionally constipated career soldier, but between them John was the sensitive one, and he had better rapport with kids.

Rodney never had rapport with kids. He only had rapport with Madison. John’s nieces still freaked him out.

“What’s up?” John asked.

“Just - come out here, please,” Rodney said. He peered at the child. “What’s your name?”

“Bailey.”

Of course. One of those unhelpfully generic names.

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

And then the child cocked one hip, tilted its head, and smiled brilliantly. “Which one do you want me to be?”

That was downright disturbing.

John hopped down out of the bus. He was wearing jeans and that one faded knit gray sweater of his that was soft and fun to cuddle up with.

Come to think of it, Bailey was terribly under-dressed for the weather.

John spotted Bailey immediately. “I see you’ve made a new friend.”

“John, this is Bailey. Bailey’s hungry and wants food. We can give her food. Peanut butter’s safe for kids, right?”

“Not if they’re allergic, no,” John said slowly. He knelt so he was eye-level with Bailey. “You’re hungry and want food, huh?”

Bailey was back to staring unblinkingly at people with that eerie blank expression. “Yes, please.”

“Where’s your mom and dad?”

“Dunno who my dad is,” Bailey said. “Mama’s asleep.”

“Asleep?” John flicked a glance at Rodney.

Rodney shrugged helplessly.

“After she burns the foil, she breathes a lot, and then she stares a lot, and then she falls asleep,” Bailey said.

An even more detailed and crazy tale. Kids made up the strangest things. People said it like it was endearing,  _ Kids say the darnedest things, _ but Rodney thought it was just weird.

“When your mama’s asleep, who takes care of you?” John asked.

Bailey lifted her chin. (Rodney made a mental decision, and from here on out, Bailey was  _ her.) _ “I take care of myself.”

“Okay,” John said, his tone gentle. “I’m not very good at cooking, and neither is Rodney, so why don’t I call my friends who are better cooks, and you can tell us what you want, and we can give you some food?”

Bailey nodded.

John went back to the bus and summoned the entire rest of the team. He made introductions - Miko’s sister was a super famous chef, Evan was an amazing baker, Dean was great at grilling, Vala made food from England, and Sam made a mean glass of chocolate milk; what did Bailey want?

“Toast, please.”

“On it,” Miko said, and she scrambled back up into the bus.

“Now Bailey,” John said, “what else can you tell us about your mama?”

Bailey reported what she’d told John.  _ See? _ Rodney wanted to say.  _ Kid’s crazy. _

Miko returned with a couple of slices of toast and a plate loaded with butter, peanut butter, honey, and three kinds of jam, because Evan had literally done something magical to the little refrigerator on the bus and it held much more food than ordinary physics would allow. Sam directed Miko and Vala to sit with Bailey at the table and help her with her toast, and then he herded everyone else to the front of the bus.

“We need to call the cops,” Sam said.

Rodney blinked. “What? Why?”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Did you hear what that little girl said?”

“Yeah, she’s crazy, says her mother breathes tinfoil and sleeps,” Rodney said. “Crazy probably runs in the family.” He’d been right, then. Bailey was a girl.

Sam said, “That little girl just described her mother using heroin, getting high, and  _ passing out.” _

“Oh.” Rodney looked at Bailey again.  _ “Oh.” _

Dean made a face. “If we call the cops, they’ll call child protective services -”

“Dean, look at that little girl! Her mother gets high and passes out and she has to go begging for food. See the way she’s smiling with Miko and Vala? She’s being nice to them so if she comes back we’ll give her more food, like a stray cat. She walked up to Rodney, a total stranger, and asked for food. That’s how hungry she is, and that’s how used to fending for herself she is,” Sam said, and he sounded very distressed.

Dean’s expression remained sour. “Sammy, that time CPS took us -”

“That was different,” Sam said. “And you know it. We  _ have _ to call the cops. What if she’d gone to someone else? Someone not as nice as Rodney?”

“I’m not sure I count as  _ nice,” _ Rodney began.

Sam cut him a sharp look. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.” And then Rodney remembered. “So, okay, I get that I’m insensitive, but Bailey - startled me. And - she has short hair and one of those generic kid voices and generic clothes and I couldn’t tell if she was a boy or a girl.”

Dean, Sam, Evan, and John all raised their eyebrows at him.

“So I asked her if she was a boy or a girl and -” Rodney swallowed hard, disgust coiling in his stomach. “She kinda cocked her hip and  _ posed _ and said  _ Which one do you want me to be?” _

Sam went pale. “We have to call the cops. Right now.” He fished his cell phone out of his pocket.

Dean pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, looked ready to throw up. Evan rubbed his shoulder briefly, then straightened up, pasted a bright smile on his face, and headed over to Miko and Vala. In cheerful tones, he asked Bailey how she liked the toast, he made the bread and jam himself, but no, not the butter. Yes, he knew how to make butter, but he didn’t make it. Maybe he would start. He could make some fancy kinds of butter, like maple butter. For pancakes. Did Bailey like pancakes?

Bailey did like pancakes but explained mostly she ate what she could find - chips, Big Gulps from the Gas-n-Sip, ramen noodles. If she was careful, she could wait till her mama and her friends were done with their foil, and then she could eat their leftovers. But when there were no leftovers, she’d ask people for food. Most people would give her some. If someone said no at first, she’d move on.

Sam headed on over, knelt down so they were eye-level, talked to her some more. How many people had she asked for food before Rodney today? How old was she? What grade was she in? What was her teacher’s name? Did she like school?

Bailey had asked no less than five people for food that day, was seven and in first grade. She couldn’t remember her teacher’s name because she didn’t go to school very often. Mama was usually too sleepy to take her or hadn’t done enough favors for other people so they would take her. Bailey told Sam her last name, spelled it proudly.

Dean, John, and Rodney drifted over as well, said hello to Bailey. Bailey wanted to touch John’s hair, wanted to know why Rodney’s mouth was crooked, was curious about the freckles on Dean’s nose. While everyone chatted with Bailey, Sam edged away and called the police.

He texted Rodney -  _ LEO ETA 15 mins _ \- and then returned. Bailey asked, shyly, for a glass of chocolate milk, and Sam smiled, went back into the bus to whip one up.

Bailey said she’d watched Rodney at his laptop for a long time before she asked him for food. Because he played games with wizards, he was probably safe, she said. Mama’s friends who played games with shooting and naked girls were usually mean.

“Games with wizards?” Vala asked.

Rodney ducked his head. “I wanted that piece of armor, all right?”

“Not the point right now,” John said through gritted teeth.

Dean knelt and looked Bailey in the eye. “When you say Mama’s friends are mean, what do you mean?”

Bailey said, “They’re bossy and want to play games I don’t want to play.”

“What games do you want to play?” Dean asked.

“Barbies,” Bailey said.

Dean ducked his head. “Sorry. Don’t have any Barbies.”

“I know,” Bailey said. “You’re grown-ups. Grown-ups don’t play with Barbies. Grown-ups play with people.”

Dean’s eyes went wide, but then he pasted on a friendly smile. “Some grown-ups do. Other grown-ups play games with wizards.”

Sam returned with glasses of chocolate milk all around. Somehow he’d found a crazy straw, and Bailey showed them all how she could blow bubbles in her milk.

They managed to keep her chatting and smiling.

She noticed the police cars immediately. The smile slid off her face, and she hopped off the picnic bench, straightened her clothes. 

“Thanks for the food. I hafta go.” And she darted between a couple of RVs.

“Bailey, wait,” Rodney called after her.

The police cars parked beside the bus, and uniformed officers stepped out.

A moment later, a woman called out, “I’ve got her, over here.”

There was a sound like a feral cat hissing, and then a young woman in jeans and a blouse emerged from the RVs where Bailey had run, towing Bailey with her. The woman was wearing some kind of ID on a lanyard around her neck.

One of the officers was a fresh-faced rookie from the looks of him, younger than Sam. The other was older, tired-looking.

“Don’t scare her,” Sam said, started toward Bailey.

She loosed an impressive array of curses at him, some that made even Dean blush.

“I  _ hate _ you. You called the cops!”

“Not our first rodeo with this family,” the woman said. “Charmaine Harris, CPS.” She nodded briskly.

Officer Maxwell, the rookie, wore a grim expression. Officer Howard, the older officer, pushed his cap higher on his head, scratched at his temple.

“What was it this time?”

Sam explained in brief, competent, legal-sounding terms what Bailey had described - seeing her mother use drugs, begging for food, and what she’d implied to Rodney.

“So the kid’s dirty, hungry, and unsupervised.” Officer Howard scribbled in his notebook. “Anything else?”

“She’s also been missing excessive amounts of school, from her own report,” Sam said. “And she probably needs to be forensically interviewed to determine if she’s been sexually abused.”

Charmaine was standing beside the picnic table, keeping a firm grip on Bailey’s arm.

Bailey’s expression had gone totally blank once more. She was still in Charmaine’s grip.

“Let’s go talk to your mom,” Officer Howard said. He beckoned to Charmaine, and she helped Bailey into the back of Officer Howard’s car.

Officer Maxwell scrambled back into his car, and then both cars pulled away.

Miko’s eyes were wide behind her glasses. “Are they going to just take her home and leave her there?”

“Maybe we should go with them,” Vala said.

Sam shook his head. “No. We can’t interfere.”

“But we can’t just  _ leave _ her there,” Evan protested.

“Can we spy on them?” Rodney asked.

Miko’s expression turned thoughtful. “Hack their body cams, maybe?”

Dean tapped Evan on the arm. “How about scrying?” 

He was asking Evan to use magic?

Evan nodded. “Get me a bowl of water.”

Dean hurried back into the bus, returned with the popcorn bowl half full of water. Now that Rodney knew what Evan was, he’d done some research, but there was nothing in the lore about aerial spirits being bound into human form. The most information he had was from Shakespeare, and Ariel in  _ The Tempest _ had been bound in a tree by Sycorax, been bound to Prospero’s will, but not human form. 

Evan had always been competent at magic by virtue of being more or less a Man of Letters, and their magic was varied and extensive. Rodney didn’t know how much of Evan’s magic was from his careful study and how much of it was innate from what he was.

But Evan didn’t strip down, activate any tattoos, just stretched a hand over the water and murmured a spell in a dead language, syllables rolling off his tongue like music.

The water, which had been sloshing gently, suddenly went flat, perfectly still. Like glass.

A looking glass.

An image coalesced on the surface. A trailer, white paint chipped and peeling, collapsing porch lined with patchy astroturf. Two police cars were parked in front of it. Officer Maxwell was standing behind Officer Howard in a tactical L, and Charmaine Harris was standing at the front door, Bailey by her side.

A woman - bleary-eyed, pale-faced, Bailey gone to seed in several decades - was propping herself up in the doorway, nodding.

“Can we get subtitles or something?” Rodney asked.

“Yes, all scrying spells come standard with subtitles,” Evan said.

Dean nudged him.

Sam cleared his throat. “There’s this thing. A listening spell. It might work.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Since when do you -?”

“It was in a Harry Potter book. Wanted to see if there was a real-life equivalent.” Sam reached for the bowl. “May I?”

Evan sat back. “Have at it.”

Sam stretched one hand over the surface of the water, incanted something very carefully in Enochian. And like that, there was sound emitting from the bowl, like it was some kind of radial speaker.

“ - I mean it,” an unfamiliar woman said. Bailey’s mother. “My aunt just stepped out. Bailey’s squirrely. Runs away. Doesn’t listen to me.”

Bailey said nothing.

Rodney expected more cursing at being called a liar, but - nothing.

Had Bailey been the one lying? She’d gone from flat to wary to animated to furious all in short spans. Did she have multiple personalities?

“You been using again, Marly?” Officer Howard asked.

“No,” she said, immediately defensive.

“If I come back here with a warrant, will I find paraphernalia?”

“No.” Marly craned her neck. “Look. There’s my Aunt Rayleen.”

A woman bustled up between the police cars. “What the hell are you doing here? You have no right to be here. You need a warrant.”

“Bailey went walkabout again, Rayleen,” Officer Howard said. “Marly says you were supposed to be watching her.”

“I just ran out for some milk,” Rayleen said. If she was what Marly was going to look like in a few years, Bailey was cursed.

“Where’s the milk?” Officer Maxwell asked.

“Quiet, Rookie.”

Rayleen reached out, snatched Bailey from Charmaine’s grip. “See? Everything’s fine. Bailey’s fine. You hungry?”

“No,” Bailey said, in that same flat voice she’d first used to address Rodney.

“Of course she’s not - we fed her,” Vala said.

“Ma’am,” Charmaine said to Marly, “you have to keep your daughter supervised. She’s not safe, crossing busy roads by herself. If we get another complaint -”

“You’ll what?” Marly asked, straightening up.

“We’ll have to take Bailey into protective custody,” Charmaine said.

Marly looked at her little girl. “You don’t want that, do you, Sweets? You don’t wanna live with strangers. You wanna stay with Mama forever, don’t you? Because Mama would be so sad if you went away.”

“Don’t be sad, Mama.” Bailey came to life, wrenched herself free from Rayleen’s grasp and flung herself at Marly, clinging to her waist and crying.

“Blatant manipulation,” Dean said, disgusted.

Sam sighed. “Drug addicts will do anything to feed their addiction. It’s a hideous disease.”

“There’s a reason,” Vala said, “some people think drug addiction is the result of demonic possession.”

“Because when demons get topside for the first time they head straight for the hookers and blow?” Dean asked.

“Well, yes, but also - it’s inside of you,” Vala said. “And you can’t fight it. Not on your own.”

“What about Bailey?” Miko asked. “She’s on her own.”

Officer Maxwell retreated to his patrol car. Charmaine climbed into Officer Howard’s, and both cars pulled away from the trailer. Rodney lifted his head, watched them drive by in real life.

Marly stepped back into the house, dragging Bailey with her, saying something to her in a fierce whisper. Rayleen went with her, and the door closed.

“That’s it?” John asked, incredulous. “They’re just going to leave her there?”

Sam scrubbed a hand over his face. “Parents have a constitutional right to parent their own children, and children have a right to be raised by their own parents. Constitutional rights cannot be infringed except by the least restrictive means. So - CPS made a safety plan, Rayleen watching the kid, and now the cops are gone.”

“That’s lawyer bullshit,” Dean said.

“Like Rayleen’s actually going to keep her safe.” John gestured at the scrying bowl. “The rookie was right - where  _ is _ the milk Rayleen said she was going for? Either spoiling in the car or-”

“There was no milk, and we all know it,” Dean said.

Sam raised his head. “You want CPS to go and take that little girl from the only family she knows? Dean,  _ you _ were the one who trained me to lie to CPS.”

“Yeah, well, Dad wasn’t the same -”

“Dad left us in sketchy motels for days on end when you were barely older than Bailey, sketchy motels full of people like Marly and her family and worse,” Sam snapped. 

“But Dad -”

“Yes, Dad eventually wised up and settled down, became a stable parent, but the fact that nothing bad happened to us when he was out hunting wasn’t because he made a good decision. We all just got lucky,” Sam said. He was breathing hard. 

Dean’s expression was pinched and pale, his entire body tense. The rest of the team had spread out around them, wary, unsure of whether to leave them alone or separate them.

Finally Dean said, “So do you want CPS to take her or not?”

“She’s not safe there and we all know it,” Sam said. “But the law is the lowest common denominator, how low people can go before the state steps in.”

Rodney gestured to the bowl of water, where the image seemed almost frozen but for a light breeze ruffling the leaves over the trailer. The trailer was silent and still. It might have been uninhabited, for how dilapidated it was. “That’s pretty damn low!”

“This isn’t our job,” Sam said.

Dean raised his eyebrows. “How is it not? Saving people, hunting things -”

“Hunting what, Dean?” Sam glanced at the scrying bowl.

“We can save that little girl,” Dean muttered.

“How? Kill her family?”

“Well, no,” Dean began.

“Where would we put her?” Evan asked quietly. “Where would she go? We can’t keep a child.”

Rodney glanced at John. “What do we do, Major?”

“We treat it like any other hunt,” John said. “We learn what we’re up against, we come up with a plan of action.”

“Okay, sir,” Sam said slowly. “What plan?”

“Stake the place out,” John said. “Gather information. Turn it in to the cops. If what we suspect is true - and it probably is - if we have proof, they won’t have any choice but to act. So let’s get it.”

Vala lit up. “Stake out!”

“Yes,” John said.

“If we park outside the trailer, someone’s going to notice,” Dean pointed out.

Rodney nudged Evan. “Can you set up more of those scrying bowls?”

Evan nodded.

“All right. Our own magical surveillance system!” Rodney rubbed his hands together. “Bowls, plates, however many it takes to get 360 degrees of vision on that place.”

“Rotating watch, every twenty minutes,” John said. “In the meantime, the rest of us keep up on the project at hand, all right?”

The project at hand was Miko, Sam, and Rodney working with Carter, Jennifer, and Bill on building a computer program to run alchemy simulations to see about forming a homunculus. The rest were running lore crawls on how to make homunculi. Most of the recipes they’d turned up involved doing questionable things to farm livestock, questionable things that didn’t match up with the information they’d found in Albert James Lewis’s journal or what they understood of the science of magic in general.

Depending on the level of ‘zoom’ on a scrying bowl, different angles of view were possible. As it turned out, it took eight bowls to get a complete 360 view of the trailer where Bailey and her family lived. It took Evan more energy than Dean liked to maintain that many scrying portals, and there was a lot of dithering before the bowls were arranged to everyone’s satisfaction, so that anyone monitoring them could see pretty much all of them at once and also have a coherent understanding of what they were looking at. Sam cast listening spells on each bowl for added surveillance value.

Given that Evan was powering the scrying bowls, he was let out of both the monitoring rotation and the lore crawl rotation. Rodney tried not to be envious of the way Lorne was curled on the couch beside Dean, resting his head on Dean’s thigh while Dean balanced his laptop on his other knee, researching. He was stroking Evan’s hair absently with one hand, and Evan was smiling as he drowsed.

They watched the house all day. Vala, in a fit of inspiration - and apparently after some consultation with Teal’c - purchased an assortment of donuts and other breakfast pastries to share around, because that was how cops did it on real stakeouts.

No one went in or out of the house. The windows were shuttered tightly, and there was no hint of movement behind them. There was no sound, no sign of any life.

And then Miko said, “Hey, someone’s approaching the house!”

Everyone abandoned what they were doing and clustered around her at the picnic table. Sure enough, a car was parked just on the edge of one of the scryed images. No one emerged from the car, though.

John said, “Arm up. Let’s go.”

They’d all changed into standard hunting gear, jeans and flannel shirts and jackets, bulky clothes that hid their weapons and also made them look pretty innocuous, even Evan. He powered down all of the scrying spells, Sam canceled the listening spells. John ordered Miko to get everyone on comms and body cams, and then they approached the parked car.

Vala, Dean, and Sam circled around back of the trailer.

John, Evan, Rodney, and Miko took the front. Rodney and John headed for the car, leaving Evan and Miko to watch the front of the trailer.

The car was old, had a bit of a beat-up paint job.

There was but one person in it, in the driver’s seat.

Rodney headed for the passenger side, dropped before he’d be in the mirror’s view, crouched and duck-walked up to the passenger door, knew John was doing the same thing on the other side. Whenever they did something like this, Rodney had to remind himself  _ this is how to approach a car while being stealthy. _ For John, Sam, Dean, and Evan, it was instinctive. They didn’t have to think about how to sneak up on a car. They just - did it. Rodney didn’t often envy them their military training.

Rodney waited for the radio tap code signal to engage with the car, and then Officer Maxwell said,

“I’m just going to pretend you didn’t just point a gun at a cop.”

Rodney popped up.

John lowered his gun. “You on an official stake-out, officer?”

“Not official, no.” In civilian clothes, Officer Maxwell looked even younger, with his short red-brown hair and his big blue eyes. “Dare I ask what agency you’re from?”

“You wouldn’t recognize it,” John said.

“Those agencies don’t usually care about junkie moms and their neglected kids,” Maxwell said.

“We’re...concerned citizens,” John said.

“As am I.”

John holstered his weapon. “We have donuts, back at our place, if you like.”

Maxwell laughed softly. “Way to pander to the stereotypes. We on the same team, then?”

“We are.”

“Pull your team back. Watch with me. And learn.”

John nodded, tapped his radio, ordered the team to stand down, pull back.

At Maxwell’s direction, Sam and Dean fetched their beloved Impala, parked it beside Maxwell’s old beat up Chevy sedan with an ugly vinyl roof. Rodney, John, Vala, and Miko piled into Maxwell’s car with him - ladies up front - leaving Sam, Dean, and Evan to watch from the other car.

Maxwell had arrived just as it was starting to get dark.

No one in the trailer had noticed the stake-out, but Maxwell said Marly was probably still sleeping off her high from earlier, and Rayleen might well be high, too.

“What about Bailey?” Rodney asked in a low voice.

“She’s keeping quiet, keeping her head down,” Maxwell said. “Probably got a stern talking to for wandering off, for bringing the cops and CPS down on their heads. If she’s smart - and she’s smart - she’ll be penitent, stay quiet, draw as little attention to herself as possible.”

Rodney cleared his throat. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

“Fifteen years ago, you could’ve mistaken Bailey for me,” Maxwell said.

Rodney glanced over at the other car, where Sam and Dean were sitting in the front seat, Dean at the wheel, Sam at the passenger window, staring straight ahead and not looking at each other. Vala didn’t remember much about her family. By all accounts, Miko and Evan’s families were very nice. John had issues with his parents, and Rodney knew he had bucketloads of issues with his.

There were issues between Sam and Dean, about their mother and father, but they never talked about them, not like this. The whole CPS thing was freaking them out, fracturing their concentration. Rodney should have been working on that simulator, but -

Another car rolled past their parked cars, pulled right up to the trailer. Everyone had ducked instinctively, but their lights were out.

Maxwell, as it turned out, had both a dashboard cam and a parabolic mic.

He fired them up, set them to record.

The front door opened, and Marly stood there, Bailey clinging to her side.

A man - skinny, tattooed, wearing a tank-top and low-slung jeans - slid out of the car, swaggered up to the house.

“Hey, Marly,” he said.

“Griff. You got it?”

Griff leaned against the doorframe, waggled a tiny baggie full of white powder just out of Marly’s reach. “That depends. You got something for me?”

Marly peeled Bailey away from her waist, pushed her toward Griff. “Don’t leave no bruises. CPS was here again.”

Bile rose in Rodney’s throat when Griff reached down, caressed Bailey’s cheek. “No worries. I know how it works.”

Marly snatched the baggie from him and vanished into the house.

Griff towed Bailey back toward his car.

Maxwell said, “Go,” but John was already half out of the car, pistol drawn.

Sam, Dean, and Evan were out of the car and circling the back of the house - no doubt to work mojo as well as military tactics.

Rodney followed John out of the car. Miko and Vala headed for the front of the house.

Rodney and John were waiting at Griff’s car before he got there.

Griff came up short. “What the -?” 

John snatched Bailey from him. “Get down on the ground. Now.”

Griff raised his hands in surrender. “Officer, I didn’t do anything wrong -”

“Not a cop,” John said. 

Griff swore. “Feds!” He turned and ran toward the house. “Marly, it’s the Feds!”

Vala swept his feet out from under him, pounced on him, her knee on his spine. “Do not move,” she snarled.

Bailey started screaming. She kicked out at John and, to Rodney’s horror, tried to snatch his pistol from him.

Rodney didn’t think. Just reacted. Incanted a sleeping cantrip.

Bailey dropped to the ground in a graceless heap, unconscious.

“Rodney!” John knelt beside her, checked her pulse.

“She’s just sleeping,” Rodney protested.

Lights popped on in the surrounding trailers. People started peeking out their windows, out their front doors, curious. What was going on? Should they call the cops?

Shouts and cries sounded from inside of Bailey’s trailer. Let us out! What’s going on? The front door rattled, but no one came out.

Sam, Dean, and Evan swept around to the front. Evan’s shirt was open and some of his tattoos were glowing. He was chanting in a dead language, and Sam was chanting with him.

All around them, lights went out, trailers went dark, and people fainted, sent into deep sleep by old, old magic.

Bailey’s trailer went still, silent, and dark as well.

Maxwell hopped out of his car, radio in hand.

“Send EMTs as well,” he was saying as he trotted over to where Rodney and John were arranging Bailey as comfortably as they could. Rodney donated his jacket to be used as a pillow; John donated his jacket for a blanket.

“Roger that,” the dispatcher replied to Maxwell.

He paused, flicked a glance at the totally dark neighborhood. The street lights had gone out, too. “Not gonna ask,” he said to Rodney.

John nodded. “Best if you don’t.”

“What now, sir?” Sam asked, falling into formation beside John.

John eyed Maxwell. “Your rodeo.”

“Back-up will be here, as will CPS and EMS,” he said. He wandered over to where Vala had been restraining Griff. He, too, was unconscious. Maxwell cuffed him. He patted Griff down, checked his pockets.

“Did you get what you needed?” Vala asked.

“Well, we got him dead to rights with some heroin and weapons he shouldn’t have,” Maxwell said. “A forensic interview of Bailey should give us the rest. If Marly’s smart, she’ll rat on Griff to make things easier for herself.”

Rodney looked down at the child sleeping at his feet. Bailey looked even younger, more vulnerable. “Will she be all right?”

“She will be,” Maxwell said. He smiled grimly and added, “I turned out all right, didn’t I?” He knelt, smoothed a hand over Bailey’s matted, dirty hair. “We’ll make sure she’s safe, well taken care of.”

Dean nudged Griff with his toe. “And this guy?”

“He’s going away for a long time.” Maxwell straightened up. “Once back-up gets here, you all better vamoose.”

John nodded. He signaled to Dean, and they all started heading for the car.

“Thank you,” Maxwell said, to Rodney. 

“Just doing our job,” Rodney replied, and though he’d said it a thousand times before, meant it as a thousand different lies, tonight the lie was heavier on his tongue. He looked down at Griff. “He was probably abused as a kid, wasn’t he?”

Maxwell raised his eyebrows. “Hm? Oh, no. Statistically, less than twenty percent of his kind of monster were victims as kids. It’s an old myth, one that pervades. Makes us feel better about the world, that there’s a reason behind the monsters, a sympathetic one. There’s a reason, but it’s not sympathetic.”

Rodney shivered at the casual way Maxwell called Griff a monster. Humans weren’t supposed to think of other humans as monsters, as anything less than humans. That led to things like - murder. Mass murder. Genocide. Slavery.

Maxwell nudged Griff with his toe again. “No, guys like this? Started offending around when they were eleven. By the time we catch them, they’ve averaged two hundred victims. They’re consummate liars and manipulators. Most of the treatment they get doesn’t really work, but we’re learning.”

“Why do you know so much about this?” Rodney asked.

“Just doing my job.”

Police lights flashed in the distance.

The play of blue and red across Maxwell’s face made him look alien, inhuman for just a moment. Then his radio was crackling and he was responding in all kinds of law enforcement shorthand, letters and numbers and codes.

Rodney was the last to climb into the car. He barely remembered getting back to the bus, helping the others round up the cups and bowls and dishes to take inside and empty out. Sam and Dean didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the night. Sam sat with Miko, poking at his share of the computer programming. Dean curled on the couch, his feet tucked under Evan’s thigh while Evan sat beside him, sketching.

“You okay?” John asked, pulling Rodney down to sit beside him on the lower of the central bunks.

“I don’t know if I am.” Rodney blinked dazedly at him. “We did the right thing, didn’t we?”

“We did,” John asid. “That little girl will be taken care of, and her mother will get the help she needs.”

“What about Griff?” Rodney asked. “Will he get the help he needs?”

“I hope so.”

“Is there help for someone like him?”

“I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2017 Shoobie Monster Fest Human Monsters day.
> 
> People are not monsters, but they are capable of some truly monstrous things.
> 
> Title from the song Prayer of the Children


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